Thin film microelectronic devices are increasingly becoming important especially in portable lightweight systems such as ultra lightweight cellular phones, high resolution displays, lightweight and flexible laptop and desktop monitors, thin wall-size television screens, and flexible radar systems. Recent advances in physical vapor deposition (PVD) chemical vapor deposition (CVD) techniques and the use of excimer laser annealing (ELA) and solid phase annealing (SPA) have reduced the processing temperatures considerably, thus promoting the use of inexpensive lightweight polymer substrates. However, existing silicon film preparation methods produce amorphous, or randomly aligned microcrystalline or polycrystalline Si films containing high densities of intrinsic microstructural defects which limit the utility of such films for high quality microelectronic applications.
Deposition of near-single crystal or single crystal Si films on polymer substrates is the first step toward achieving high quality flexible microelectronics. However, the non-crystalline nature of polymer makes it very difficult to employ a number of existing vapor-liquid and solid phase epitaxial growth processes because such processes rely on the crystalline character of the substrates. Secondly, the low melting or softening temperature of polymers makes it impractical to utilize the steady-state directional solidification processes, such as zone melting recrystallization of Si films on SiO2 using a laser, a focused lamp, an electron beam or a graphite strip heater, previously developed for producing single crystal Si films. Usually the thin films formed on amorphous substrates are amorphous or are randomly polycrystalline in the sub-micrometer scale. Therefore, a low temperature process for forming highly crystalline or single crystal layers on temperature sensitive polymeric substrates is required.